Android 4.0 ported to Raspberry Pi’s $35 Linux computer

The port includes support for hardware-accelerated graphics and video playback.

The Raspberry Pi foundation announced today that its popular $35 Linux computer will soon be able to run Android 4.0. Google’s mobile operating system is being ported to the device by Broadcom developer Naren Sankar.

The Raspberry Pi foundation was originally founded in 2009 with the aim of building a low-cost computer that can be used to teach computer programming to young students. The organization’s $35 computer—a bare board that is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards—has a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It sparked considerable demand when it launched earlier this year.

Because the Raspberry Pi computer uses an ARM11 CPU instead of a chip based on the more ubiquitous ARMv7 architecture, software support is somewhat limited. Recent versions of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, for example, aren’t compatible. The Raspberry Pi foundation provides a special version of Fedora that is tailored to run on the device. There is also a specially optimized Debian port called Raspbian that is under development.

Android 4.0 could be a compelling option for some Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. According to the Raspberry Pi foundation, the Android port has support for hardware-accelerated graphics and video playback. Some features are still missing, however. It doesn’t yet support AudioFlinger, the Android sound system.

Sankar has published a YouTube video that demonstrates the port. It appears to work relatively well, though Android’s performance and responsiveness on the Raspberry Pi is obviously not as good as it would be on a higher-end device. Video playback appears smooth, however, due to the hardware acceleration.

The port currently uses its own customized Linux kernel rather than the version of the Linux kernel maintained by the Raspberry Pi foundation. The foundation says that it is working to converge the two and wants to bring them into alignment before publishing the source code.

Hmmmm.. At $35 a pop, how feasible would it be to have a mesh network of anonymous proxy servers routing traffic all around? Kinda like TOR on steroids. Sure, there could be a dark side attributed to it but I'm getting pretty concerned about the erosion of privacy online as of late.

Granted, I'm sure it would last all of about five minutes before being outlawed but it's food for thought none the less.

It'll be a while yet before the work on the Android port can be merged into their own trees:

liz wrote:

To avoid a million different forks appearing, we’re going to wait until we have a release candidate, which I’d anticipate taking at least a month at the moment. We’ll be making an announcement here as soon as that’s ready, of course.

If they can do it, having accelerated 2D, 3D, and video will make the Pi much more useful than right now with 2 of those lacking in normal operation.

Hmmmm.. At $35 a pop, how feasible would it be to have a mesh network of anonymous proxy servers routing traffic all around? Kinda like TOR on steroids. Sure, there could be a dark side attributed to it but I'm getting pretty concerned about the erosion of privacy online as of late.

Granted, I'm sure it would last all of about five minutes before being outlawed but it's food for thought none the less.

Best i can tell the issue with TOR is the bandwidth between nodes, not the number of them.

Wow. That's pretty impressive. I've been enjoying hacking on mine. I might have to buy a second so I can have one for general Linux hacking and one for Android hacking. ...like I really needed an excuse to get a second one anyway...

Hmmmm.. At $35 a pop, how feasible would it be to have a mesh network of anonymous proxy servers routing traffic all around? Kinda like TOR on steroids. Sure, there could be a dark side attributed to it but I'm getting pretty concerned about the erosion of privacy online as of late.

Granted, I'm sure it would last all of about five minutes before being outlawed but it's food for thought none the less.

The RasPi leaves something to be desired when it comes to computing muscle. The video preformance is mostly a product of the hardware acceleration....it's definately a cool device, and I've enjoyed playing with mine, but I think that the encryption required for Tor would bring this device to its knees.

It'll be a while yet before the work on the Android port can be merged into their own trees:

liz wrote:

To avoid a million different forks appearing, we’re going to wait until we have a release candidate, which I’d anticipate taking at least a month at the moment. We’ll be making an announcement here as soon as that’s ready, of course.

If they can do it, having accelerated 2D, 3D, and video will make the Pi much more useful than right now with 2 of those lacking in normal operation.

It's not exactly a paperweight for me, I'd just like it to get to the point where I can run a desktop environment comfortably for lightweight tasks like productivity software, maybe a little light browsing. Right now, with the 2D drawing done by the (weak) CPU, things get creaky in a hurry. Offloading that to the GPU leaves a lot more headroom. The 256MB of RAM isn't even a limit for most of what I do, but CPU usage can skyrocket in normal tasks. I tried running Gedit and there was a severe lag between pressing keys and text showing up on the screen. It was even worse when the OS didn't have hardware floating point optimizations.

once they get audio working, i can see myself buying one and building myself a carputer again. i was thinking of using my old lg ally as a carputer since it has similar specs, but couldn't think of an easy way to make it look as built-in as this would be.

The Raspberry Pi foundation was originally founded in 2009 with the aim of building a low-cost computer that can be used to teach computer programming to young students.

I hate to be negative, but it seems to me that, if this is the goal, it'd be easier (and more useful in the long run) to help teach those kids programming on existing computer platforms by contributing funding for school computer labs and college scholarships.

Even with the low cost of the Pi, parents that couldn't afford to buy their children even a low-end laptop PC (and used ones can be pretty cheap) probably would still be hard-pressed to justify a complete Pi system (with keyboard, mouse, case, power supply, and ideally a dedicated monitor). I did a little quick pricing on the Internet, and a bare-bones Pi system would run about $75 without monitor ($150 with a small LCD panel). Then there's the learning materials the kids would need (or the Internet access to download them). And what good does it do a kid to learn to program when their parents can't afford to send them to college? (Sadly, "Self-taught in Python programming" isn't really a marketable job skill.) Still, I suppose everyone has to start somewhere.

The Raspberry Pi is a cool bit of hardware, though, and I'm sure people will come up with all kinds of novel uses for them... heck, they already are (just check raspberrypi.org's blog). But I'd wager the bulk of those people are hobbyists who already knew how to program (or had the time and resources to learn), can afford normal PCs with Internet access, and aren't exactly kids.

@Aimhere: Its interesting watching you mention the school system acquiring existing, by which I understand "real", computer platforms, etc.. I think school systems would go crazy if they could buy Pi's as a cheap platform to teach programming. No only that, but by changing the boot sd they can teach in different, albeit with similar roots, environments. For an individual family in a budget anything can be expensive, but for schools the Pi can be a blessing.

And, unless you are coding close to the metal, learning a programming language can be done on any computer platform and you can easily take what you learn to any other platform. In fact, once you learn a couple of computer languages, learning more is a million times easier.

On the Pi, CPU aside I wish they would have included more memory or an upgrade path for it.

Given that the Pi is significantly less powerful than say, an HTC Desire, which Cyanogenmod recently announced wouldn't get a port of CM9 (ie Android 4), I really can't see that this is ever actually going to be useful.

My Pi runs Debian headless, and provides an audio source for my Squeezebox audio player, which it does very well, but I'm not sure it's got the oomph (either CPU or RAM) to be able to run Android 4 with any degree of success.

Can you write an article and NOT mention Ubuntu?Or at the very least do NOT mention Ubuntu in reference to the R-Pi?

If Ubuntu simply didnt work it would be one thing but not only are they not interested but Canonical specifically asked the R-Pi board NOT to ever mention them again. I think the word used to describe their only communication as rather 'pretty brutal'.Most other distros has soemone get in touch with the Pi people asking how they could help port it. Canonical called to tell them to shut up.They don’t support the chip, they’re not interested in supporting the chip and they were pretty vocal about stopping them from talking about Buntu.

So eff Canonical, dont give them free mentions on a specific project they dont want to be associated with.Respect their wishes after all.